Tuesday, November 16, 2010

A 'fatal error' policy for student writing?

Fifteen years ago, the business faculty at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville adopted a 'fatal error' policy for student writing. They first identified what they called eight fatal errors in student writing: misspelled words, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, errors in capitalization, errors in punctuation that obscure meaning, mistakes in verb tense or subject/verb agreement, improper or inadequate citation, and failure to conform to the assignment format.

Here's the policy:

Students had 48 hours to correct all Fatal Errors and resubmit. It did not matter how the corrections got done: visit the writing center, talk with a roommate, consult a parent, pay an editor. If papers were resubmitted on time, they were graded as if the professors had never seen them before… minus one letter grade . If a paper still contained the threshold of Fatal Errors, the grade could be no higher than a D. If a paper was not resubmitted, the grade would be a fail.

The results?

Word got around fast among students. They knew that the Fatal Error Policy existed, knew the consequences, and edited their papers. It's critical to note that just because Fatal Errors no longer occurred, student writing did not substantially improve. Instead, professors were able to focus their feedback on disciplinary issues such as internal logic, quality of information, use of evidence, and audience awareness – rather than nitpicking the annoying grammar and spelling mistakes. Over time, student writing improved due to the improvement in faculty feedback.

So by pressuring students toward minimal standards, faculty were better able to give feedback that focused on, well, maximal standards.

Is this fatal error policy a good idea? If so, would you have the same fatal errors for student philosophical writing that the business faculty had for their students?

11 comments:

I like it. I would have at least one fatal error (or one family): refer to the correct author, spell correctly the names of authors, and where it should be a no-brainer, get their gender(s) correct. (I see this too often on short, and obviously hastily written reflective assignments.)

Did the instructor do the work of identifying all the fatal errors? I hope not. Rather, this would work best if the paper was returned merely saying "this paper contains more than three fatal errors," and the student has to do the work of identifying them.

Another alternative, of course, is to ignore the "fatal errors" and go straight for the disciplinary issues anyway. The main motivation for a "fatal errors policy," I take it, is to get students to learn good mechanics. Do you know whether this happened? Or were they simply having someone else fix the errors for them, without learning to do it themselves?

One category to add: Improper use of there/their/they're, your/you're, its/it's, etc.

This suggests that David Morrow's suggested alternative is a good one: "It's critical to note that just because Fatal Errors no longer occurred, student writing did not substantially improve. Instead, professors were able to focus their feedback on disciplinary issues such as internal logic, quality of information, use of evidence, and audience awareness – rather than nitpicking the annoying grammar and spelling mistakes. Over time, student writing improved due to the improvement in faculty feedback."

The implication, and what I have been advised by people who claim to know how to teach writing, is that we should basically ignore spelling and grammatical errors when grading philosophy papers. That isn't easy to do, though, and I'm not completely convinced. But maybe it's true.

We could still have a fatal error policy, though, perhaps along the lines suggested by Matthew Pianalto.

As a rhetoric and composition professor, I would point to Haswell's essay on "minimal marking." The idea is this: stop fixing the mistakes, and just put a line in the margin that signals there is a mistake. More often than not, the student will fix it themselves.

My own policy with student writing (whether undergraduate or graduate) is to limit myself to two comments per page (roughly). I have to pick what is most deserving of commentary, and, of course, I have a hierarchy of concerns. If grammar is the most serious offense, than that is what receives attention. If there are other problems, then I lead with them. I write a few paragraphs at the end of a paper that both praises what the student did write and targets what needs to improve--in the case of a poor grade, I will tell them "there were more flaws in the paper than I had occasion to highlight. If you plan on revising and resubmitting this work, then you really need to meet with me for a discussion" or "there are several other issues with this paper that warrant a C/D/F grade, but you need to focus on those I lay out in the margins as your primary concerns for our next assignment."

One last point--students will invest energy in what gets prioritized. For my own part, I would rather them invest energy in logical development than in grammatical correctness. I would approve of this method much more if the Fatal Flaw criteria spoke to more important issues (any paper that introduces a source yet fails to relate the source to the central argument etc).

Something like this (and I like some of the suggestions for altering the fatal errors list) would be great, _if_ it were implemented department wide. The main problem with the suggestion to ignore these kinds of errors is that sometimes the errors are so egregious that it is difficult to read and/or to understand the student's paper. If we really want to ensure that the students are learning to make the corrections themselves, the policy could include the stipulation that the resubmitted paper must be accompanied by a receipt for a visit to the writing center or to a (hopefully departmental or humanities specific) tutoring center.

Is it possible that something like this might get them into the habit of allowing time to review their papers and hence reduce the haste in which they are written?

I am a studying for an MA in Philosophy and I don't even know if my university (The Open University in the UK) considers grammar and spelling mistakes in its grading. I find it to be in my own interest to not include any mistakes of this kind, because I feel that they would undermine the perceived quality of my reasoning.As a reader, I dismiss anything that has poor grammar or spelling, often giving up on papers or books marred by these mistakes.

Although I find it harder to comply with the standards of correct English (it's not my mother tongue), I think that students should be forced to concnetrate on these rules. My thumbs up for the "fatal error" policy

Actually, this sounds similar to a policy a high school English teacher of mine used for her junior and senior courses: "one-point-off errors."

For every instance of basic errors like improper use of it's/its, your/you're, their/there/they're, etc., along with (I think) certain other spelling, grammatical, and capitalization errors, she would deduct one point off of an essay's grade. In one way, it's less stringent than a "fatal error" policy (no automatic fail); in another, it seems harsher: there was no resubmitting to correct one-point-off errors (if you couldn't keep "to," "two," and "too" straight, you could quickly do significant damage to your course grade).

In college, I found myself wishing that some of my classmates had been subjected to the same policy. ;)

On an off-topic note, I wonder if the person who named this policy stood with one foot in a CS department. "Fatal error" reminds me of software crash messages.

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